Yet another false rape claim exposed in Britain

These cases are coming thick and fast. Cry-rape girl, 20, dragged man into toilets for sex to claim £7,500 compensation -- with the usual shocking effects on her male victim

A woman faces jail after luring a man into having sex with her and then crying rape in a plot to claim thousands of pounds in compensation. Sarah-Jane Hilliard, 20, applied for £7,500 from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority days after falsely accusing Grant Bowers, 19, of raping her. Yesterday, the telesales employee was told she faced a jail term, after her web of lies was exposed in court in May.

Hilliard told police she met up with Mr Bowers, whom she regarded as a friend, at Liquid nightclub in Basildon, Essex, on July 26 last year. She said he joined her and a friend in their taxi home, but when she stopped in a public toilet by the railway station he came in and attacked her.

In reality they had met at another club and walked to the station, and it was she who lured him into the toilet - even telling him he 'better be there for the baby' if she became pregnant. Mr Bowers was arrested and bailed. But eight days later, after police failed to find CCTV images of the pair outside Liquid, Hilliard's friend confessed that they had actually been in the nearby Colors nightclub all night. CCTV footage from there clearly showed Hilliard and Mr Bowers, both from Basildon, kissing and holding hands before leaving. Officers contacted Mr Bowers and told him he would not be charged and instead arrested Hilliard for perverting the course of justice.

But this did not save him from being made a hate figure. 'The last 11 months have been horrendous,' he said. 'I've lost all my self- confidence. I don't know why she did it but her lies have ruined my life.'

Mr Bowers's father, Tony, 48, said his son had to move out of Basildon because of threats against him. He said: 'After the court case people started kicking the door of his flat in and shouting "rapist" though the letterbox. 'He moved into temporary accommodation but he heard that people were offering £100 to find out where he was. He's been threatened and chased through town with a knife too. 'He's petrified. He's left Basildon and is staying with friends because he's worried about what's going to happen.'

In Hilliard's trial at Basildon Crown Court in May, Andrew Jackson, prosecuting, said: 'This incident has changed Mr Bowers. 'He speaks of his lack of confidence approaching young women, not trusting them and having trouble sleeping. 'He was physically sick through worry, constantly teary and feeling like he wanted to cry.'

Jacqueline Carey, defending, said Hilliard had an 'extremely difficult period in her past' which she had discussed with a psychiatrist. Hilliard was found guilty and was due to be sentenced yesterday but that was adjourned until next month to wait for further psychiatric reports.

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Women have been "liberated" into drunkenness

It was once a great disgrace for a woman to be found drunk. No more. And the results are not pretty

It seemed too horrendous even to imagine. But the case of the mother who caused a deadly wrong-way crash while drunk and stoned is part of a disturbing trend: Women in the U.S. are drinking more, and drunken-driving arrests among women are rising rapidly while falling among men. And some of those women, as in the New York case, are getting behind the wheel with kids in the back.

Men still drink more than women and are responsible for more drunken-driving cases. But the gap is narrowing, and among the reasons cited are that women are feeling greater pressures at work and home, they are driving more, and they are behaving more recklessly. "Younger women feel more empowered, more equal to men, and have been beginning to exhibit the same uninhibited behaviors as men," said Chris Cochran of the California Office of Traffic Safety.

Another possible reason cited for the rising arrests: Police are less likely to let women off the hook these days. Nationwide, the number of women arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs was 28.8 percent higher in 2007 than it was in 1998, while the number of men arrested was 7.5 percent lower, according to FBI figures that cover about 56 percent of the country. (Despite the incomplete sample, Alfred Blumstein, a Carnegie Mellon University criminologist, said the trend probably holds true for the country as a whole.) "Women are picking up some of the dangerously bad habits of men," said Chuck Hurley, CEO of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

In New York's Westchester County, where Diane Schuler's crash killed her and seven other people last month, the number of women arrested for drunken driving is up 2 percent this year, and officers said they are noticing more women with children in the back seat. "We realized for the last two to three years, the pattern of more female drivers, particularly mothers with kids in their cars, getting arrested for drunk driving," said Tom Meier, director of Drug Prevention and Stop DWI for the county. In one case there, a woman out clubbing with her teenage daughter was sent to prison for causing a wrong-way crash that killed her daughter's friend.

Another woman was charged with driving drunk after witnesses said she had been drinking all day before going to pick up her children at school. Authorities said the children were scared during the ride, and once they got home, they jumped out of the car, ran to a neighbor's house and told an adult, who called police. The mother lay passed out in the car, and police said her blood alcohol level was 0.27 percent -- more than three times the legal limit.

In California, based on the same FBI figures, women accounted for 18.8 percent of all DUI arrests in 2007, up from 13.5 percent in 1998, according to the California Office of Traffic Safety.

Unlike men, women tend to drink at home and alone, which allows them to conceal a problem more easily. Because of this, they seek treatment less often than men, and when they do, it is at a later stage, often when something catastrophic has already happened, said Dr. Petros Levounis, director of the Addiction Institute of New York at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center. "Our society has taught us that women have an extra burden to be the perfect mothers and perfect wives and perfect daughters and perfect everything," Levounis said. "They tend to go to great lengths to keep everything intact from an external viewpoint while internally, they are in ruins."

In the current recession, women's incomes have become more important because so many men have lost their jobs, experts say. Men are helping out more at home, but working mothers still have the bulk of the child rearing responsibilities. "Because of that, they have a bigger burden then most men do," said clinical psychologist Carol Goldman. "We have to look at the pressures on women these days. They have to be the supermom."

And just becoming a parent doesn't mean people will stop using drugs or alcohol, Ducharme said: "If you have a real addictive personality, just having a child isn't going to make the difference."

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Are liberals seceding from sanity?

By Michael Lind, a Leftist who recognizes Leftist bigotry. He says that the left is crazy to insult white Southerners as a group, as indeed they are. There are a lot of electoral college votes in the South. So why are the Left so hostile? Lind does not say but that their hate overcomes their reason is the obvious answer

Back in the 1960s, Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Hofstadter and other liberal sociologists, historians and political scientists, puzzled that anyone could support Barry Goldwater rather than Lyndon Johnson, concluded that Goldwater supporters were deranged. They didn't say so directly, of course. They said that members of the radical right were emotionally disturbed victims of "status anxiety." The evidence? They didn't vote the way that Lipset and other academics thought that they should vote. Therefore they had to be crazy.

In the decades since, far better scholars than Hofstadter and Lipset, for whom history and sociology are not exercises in partisan Democratic mythmaking, have established that Goldwater and Reagan Republicans often were highly educated, socially secure individuals who happened not to share the values of liberal professors and journalists. This scholarship has been wasted, to judge by the glee with which the liberal blogosphere, in the aftermath of the ephemeral "Birther" flap, has dusted off the old conservatives-are-crazy meme, and revised it to suggest that all white Southerners are crazy.

In a recent Washington Post column, Kathleen Parker quoted Ohio Sen. George Voinovich's assertion that the Republican Party is "being taken over by Southerners" to suggest that the GOP risks becoming a permanent minority party of the old Confederacy. In itself this is a legitimate point that I and many other critics of Republican conservatism have made for years. However, at Mother Jones, the blogger Kevin Drum used Parker's political argument as an excuse for all-too-typical liberal Southern-bashing. According to Drum: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual Southern whites who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, Southern white culture is [redacted]. Jim Webb can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]." Drum did the redacting on his own blog post, explaining he'd blacked out the offending text "on the advice of my frontal lobe."

Drum's creepy bigotry becomes clear when other groups are substituted: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual blacks who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, black culture is [redacted]. Barack Obama can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]." Or maybe this: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual Jews who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, Jewish culture is [redacted]. The late Irving Howe can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]."

If his Wikipedia entry is to be believed, Kevin Drum grew up in California, the same enlightened California that during his childhood and early adulthood gave our nation Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the tax-revolt politics of Howard Jarvis. More recently, California voters amended the state Constitution to outlaw gay marriage. I grew up in Texas, which gave our nation champions of the New Deal and civil rights like Maury Maverick, Ralph Yarborough, Lyndon Johnson, Henry Gonzalez, Barbara Jordan, Lloyd Doggett and Sarah Weddington, who argued Roe v. Wade. Texas is less progressive than it once was and California is less conservative than it once was, but someone from the land of Nixon and Reagan should think twice about lecturing other parts of the country. Nor are other regions bastions of political virtue. The last two governors of Illinois are in prison or on the way there, the biggest political scandal of the moment involves mayors and rabbis in New Jersey, and the world economy was recently wrecked thanks in large part to certain investment banks and hedge funds headquartered not in Mississippi but in Manhattan.

In her Washington Post essay, Kathleen Parker writes: "Hefty majorities in the Northeast, the Midwest and the West believe Obama was born in the United States. But in the land of cotton, where old times are not by God forgotten" -- evidently this is intended to be a strained joke -- "only 47 percent believe Obama was born in America and 30 percent aren't sure. Southern Republicans, it seems, have seceded from sanity." Kevin Drum thinks that Parker is too kind and that white Southerners as a group should be thought of as having "seceded from sanity."

Oh, those dumb white Southerners! No other group in American society could possibly believe in preposterous conspiracy theories. Well, maybe one other group, the most reliably Democratic demographic in the whole U.S. electorate. A 2005 study by RAND and Oregon State University showed that a majority of blacks believed that a cure for AIDS was being withheld from the poor; that nearly half believed that AIDS was man-made, with a quarter believing that it was created in a U.S. government laboratory and 12 percent naming the CIA as its source. Black paranoia about AIDS is understandable, given the Tuskegee experiments. Even so, the theory that AIDS was created by the CIA to commit genocide against black people is wackier than the craziest Birther conspiracy theories. Would Kathleen Parker write, or the Washington Post publish, a column arguing that black Democrats "have seceded from sanity"? Would Kevin Drum applaud Parker's insult and extend to it to all African-Americans?

When liberal pundits are not arguing that white conservatives are insane, they are explaining conservatism in the patronizing spirit of Lipset and the '60s liberals as the result, not of ideology or theology, but of the irrational resentment of the "angry white male." But what about the angry white female? If white men in the South and elsewhere who do not vote for the Democrats are by definition hate-filled racists upset by social progress, then the same must be true of white women who vote the same way.

By this test, it appears that there are a lot of angry white women and that they have been angry for decades. In 2008 white women preferred John McCain to Barack Obama by 53-47 (compare white men, 57-41). They backed George W. Bush in 2004 by 55-44 percent and in 2000 by a narrow 49-48 percent. A majority of white women in 1996 split their votes among Dole (43) and Perot (8), giving Clinton only a minority of their vote at 48 percent. In 1992 white women were even more anti-Clinton, giving Bush (41 percent) and Perot (18 percent) in combination a majority. White women gave the first Bush 56 percent of their vote in 1988, and they gave Reagan 62 percent in 1984 and 52 percent in 1980. They preferred Ford to Carter, 52-36. I could go on, but you get the picture. Clearly, to judge from their unwillingness to support Democratic presidential candidates since the 1960s, most white women, like most white men, are evil, hate-filled racist monsters.

Curiously, the progressive punditariat, so voluble about "angry white men," is silent about the decades-old Republican bias of white women. Even more curious is the paradox that liberals routinely denounce white Southern Protestants for holding the very social views that are held by majorities or near-majorities of blacks and Latinos who form the electoral base of the Democratic Party.

Consider gay rights. According to a Gallup poll in December 2008, only 31 percent of black Democrats consider homosexuality morally acceptable, compared to 61 percent of non-black Democrats. The proportion of black Democrats who think that homosexuality is immoral is identical to the proportion of all Republicans who think so. The double standard of the white liberal left was evident, when California voters narrowly passed an amendment banning gay marriage. Here is the AP: "California's black and Latino voters, who turned out in droves for Barack Obama, also provided key support in favor of the state's same-sex marriage ban. Seven in 10 black voters backed a successful ballot measure to overturn the California Supreme Court's May decision allowing same-sex marriage, according to exit polls for the Associated Press. More than half of Latino voters supported Proposition 8, while whites were split." There were lots of news stories about pro-gay-rights liberals denouncing the Mormon Church for its role in the campaign. Where were the liberals angrily denouncing black and Latino voters opposed to gay marriage?

Latinos, like blacks, are far more likely than whites to oppose abortion. According to a 2007 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Hispanic Center, nearly half of second-generation Latinos think that abortion should be illegal, while 65 percent of first-generation Latinos think it should be outlawed. Indeed, the overall level of Latino opposition to abortion, 57 percent, is higher than that of any other group. Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum, described Latino immigrants as being out of the mainstream, saying that second-generation Latinos (the more "liberal" cohort that is split nearly 50-50!) are "much, much closer to mainstream American values ... in stark contrast to the first generation who are much more conservative on this issue." Imagine the uproar if Rush Limbaugh or Patrick Buchanan said that Latino immigrants are far from "mainstream American values."

To read progressive pundits, you'd think that illegal immigration would not be controversial, were it not for hate-filled Southern rednecks. But according to a 2006 Pew poll, "Both whites (55 percent) and blacks (54 percent) are more likely than Hispanics (29 percent) to see immigrants as a burden." In Barack Obama's Chicago, according to Pew in 2006, "there is a widespread perception among African Americans that immigrant workers are damaging local jobs prospects. Fully 41 percent of African Americans say they or a family member has lost a job, or not gotten a job, because an employer hired an illegal immigrant instead." A Gallup poll in December 2008 revealed that 47 percent of black Americans thought that illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay in the U.S., while exactly the same percentage, 47 percent, thought that illegal immigrants should be arrested and deported.

Blacks and Latinos, it appears, are allowed to hold conventionally conservative social views about gay rights, abortion and (in the case of blacks) immigration without being mocked and denounced by elite white liberals in the pages of the Washington Post and Mother Jones, as long as they vote for the Democratic Party on the basis of other issues. This strategic logic should lead liberals to seek out and welcome the vote of white social conservatives in the South and elsewhere, as long as they vote for Democrats for reasons other than the social issues. Indeed, socially conservative white voters helped to create and to maintain the new Democratic majority in Congress. But many liberals, it would appear, would rather have a smaller Democratic Party than one that includes more white Southerners with typically "black" or "Latino" views about sex and reproduction.

Here's how I see it. Liberals should respect and promote the interests of working Americans of all races and regions, including those who despise liberals. They are erring neighbors to be won over, not cretins to be mocked.

The majority of Southerners, white and black, including the black Southern diaspora in other regions of the country, are victims of the South's historic caste and class system, just as many Latino immigrants come from families and regions oppressed by Latin American oligarchies. Needless to say, Southern blacks suffered far more from slavery, segregation and the inequality that has persisted even after the abolition of the formal caste system. But Southern whites reduced to debt peonage after the Civil War, and the half of the white Southern electorate that effectively was disfranchised by the Southern elite in the South between the 1900s and the 1960s, were victims of the oligarchs as well. It is only to be expected that people, black and white, who have been deprived of adequate education will be more likely than educated people to believe in nonsense like Birther conspiracy theories and AIDS conspiracy theories. And it is only to be expected that people, black and white, who have been frozen out of politics by oligarchic elites will turn to flamboyant populist tribunes as their leaders, including theatrical preachers like Pat Robertson and Jeremiah Wright, Al Sharpton and Jerry Falwell.

The traditional liberal solution to such alienation is economic reform, education and political empowerment. But reform is difficult and expensive. And it is much less fun than caricaturing entire ethnic or regional groups, particularly those whose members tend to have less money, less education and less power than those who lampoon them.

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Desegregation misfires

Top down approaches by western governments to end race segregation are dislocating well-functioning communities and interfering with the process of desegregation 'from below'

The United States is pursuing a policy of racial desegregation by subsidising construction of affordable housing in the country’s wealthy areas and marketing the housing to racial minorities. The aim is to pepper disadvantaged people across areas where infrastructure and services are well-established and effective, and disperse disadvantaged ghettos.

But the government has missed the point. In its ham-fisted attempt to end racial discrimination, policymakers have overlooked the fact that many of these ‘ghettos’ are fast gentrifying.

Some of the nation’s best charter schools service the Bronx and Harlem. Crime rates in the Bronx are now lower than in Queens, and Harlem is below the national median crime rate. Upper Manhattan is reviving its jazz-era soul as brownstones are restored amidst a bunch of hip (hop) nightspots. And you can’t go past the tamales sold by Hispanic ladies on late winter nights at 137th and Broadway.

Just as conditions are looking up in these communities, do-gooders want disadvantaged people to move out. And they’re being moved to areas where services do not target their needs.

As settlement for a major legal battle, Westchester County this week agreed to spend US$50 million on one such affordable housing scheme. It will construct cheap housing in its whitest and wealthiest areas.

But the suburbs targeted by the settlement are some of the nation’s most expensive. From grocery prices to doctors, businesses service the needs of the affluent. Perhaps US$450 spring dresses and personal pilates training sessions are the panacea for discrimination?

Policymakers should look beyond these cosmetic attempts to end discrimination. Desegregation is already occurring as areas that were once considered disadvantaged are being rediscovered and redeveloped by new generations of upwardly mobile Americans. These same Americans elected the first black President. He might consider letting them bring real change to New York.

The above is a press release from the Centre for Independent Studies, dated August 14th. Enquiries to cis@cis.org.au. Snail mail: PO Box 92, St Leonards, NSW, Australia 1590. Telephone ph: +61 2 9438 4377 or fax: +61 2 9439 7310

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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